1,720,964 research outputs found
Genre hybridization in annual reports: the case of Walmart
No full textAnnual reports typically include a letter to the shareholders signed by the CEO of the company. The reports are usually well crafted, printed on glossy paper and enriched with photographs and coloured images in the narrative section. It is indeed common knowledge that while being a required financial document, they also work as marketing material with the double aim of offering business/financial information and presenting the best qualities of the company. This dual character is also reflected in annual reports’ discourse, which has been widely acknowledged as an instance of hybrid genre (Bhatia 2010; de Groot 2013; White and Hanson 2000; Zanola 2009). The dual aim and target of annual reports have prompted scholars to analyse them through linguistic, multimodal, and semiotic approaches to define the contours of the interdiscursive nature (Bhatia 2010) of this textual genre. Hence, annual reports are both simultaneously and ambiguously, required financial documents and marketing tools to advertise businesses. Such ambiguity reflects on the communicative content of these reports. In this paper, we carried out a diachronic analysis of Walmart’s annual reports. The study integrates visual, lexical, and syntactical analysis of annual reports over an eight-year time span. Our objective was to describe discursive aspects of annual reports at multiple textual levels and to observe whether and toward what direction the discourse has developed. In order to achieve this aim, we identified Walmart’s annual reports as an ideal corpus. Firstly, they are freely available online, encouraging this way the attraction of both technical and non-technical audiences; moreover, older reports are also available for consultation and comparison. Secondly, Walmart is a huge American multinational business, which operates in 28 countries and is considered the world's largest company by revenue. It turns out that Walmart is inherently global and serves a very diversified audience.
This study may contribute both to the characterization of annual reports as a hybrid genre, and to the compilation of an anthology of textual and interdiscursive strategies for annual report writing.
Corporate knowledge dissemination through digital storytelling: online discourse strategies in Italian agrifood product companies selling around the world
No full textThis paper aims at investigating the linguistic strategies used in promoting Italian agri-food products worldwide by considering how linguistic choices adapt to actors and agents, destination building and branding, and knowledge dissemination. Basing the study on both quantitative and qualitative methods, the English versions of a corpus of Italian websites will be taken into consideration in order to analyse how online narratives promote Italian products and how strategies of dissemination of the “Made in Italy” image influence non-Italian costumers
Corporate marketing through legitimation and identity construction: launching the Sputnik V vaccine
No full textThis study investigates how corporate marketing of an anti-COVID-19 vaccine candidate Sputnik V uses referential identity construction and (de)legitimation mechanisms to integrate informational and promotional data on a specifically created website. Combining corpus analytical tools with discourse analytical techniques and relying on Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) framework of identity and van Leeuwen’s (2007) legitimation theory, the study delves into the most prominent identity claims of the vaccine on its website. The findings reveal a robust link between the vaccine’s brand / identity construction and the nation branding of Russia. The nested configuration of indexical and relational identity claims through ideologically informed representations of Sputnik V / Russia as scientifically proven, safe, effective and economically profitable vs. other vaccines and manufacturers that discursively lacked those qualities and were openly delegitimated showed how communication was predominantly directed at large state entities rather than individuals, differentiating this discourse from media communication on vaccines. In the wake of a global pandemic, some of the company’s identity claims were clearly meant to legitimate and promote not only the vaccine, but also the country, operating on an ideological level
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Those who get lost in communication science. Promotion and downplay in university press releases
No full textThe present study is part of a larger project based on two matching corpora: one comprising academic articles and the other collecting the respective popularized pieces. Here, we present the preliminary results on a sub-corpus of 39 university e-releases on Covid-19 research. The objective of this study is to investigate how universities use press releases to disseminate research studies while promoting themselves. The analysis puts university press releases and academic articles in correlation by looking at the correspondence between the authors mentioned in the dissemination pieces with the authors and affiliations of the original research. It is argued that in the attempt to promote themselves through press releases, universities might tend to overemphasize the participation of their affiliated authors at the cost of overshadowing external collaborations. The quantitative analysis reveals a tendency for universities releasing popularized pieces to mention more often (and sometimes only) their affiliated authors, even when they are not first authors. External authors’ names and their affiliations are consistently omitted and vague language is used to misrepresent content and authorship
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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